The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

As a person fully dedicated to protecting others from making the same mistakes I keep making, let me share with any of you contemplating guitar luthiery, the sad sorry saga of my last acoustic guitar, the 5th in a series of steep learning curves, inadequate preparations, insufficient tools and, well, a dearth of about everything except moxie. Moxie I got plenty of. Too much maybe. Einstein’s definition of insanity, that repeating your same mistakes and expecting better results, totally applies to me. Sadly. But since I pretend to be a so-called artist, I can justify my guitars, not as failures, but as artistic ‘gestures’, works in progress, evolutionary aesthetics.

My last gesture was a nice little black limba guitar, what professionals in the trade would call a parlor guitar. What I call a small guitar. But big on interesting woods in the neck and body, details like tailpieces and side soundholes and pickguards that set it apart from other guitars. Trouble was, my original redwood top had sagged with the tension of the strings and an experimental bracing system underneath. Like mostly all the other four gestures, this one needed to be dismantled and repaired. The redwood top broke when I pried up after using a blowtorch to loosen the glue holding it to the body. Bummer, man. And then when I tried to remove a block holding the neck, the entire front end of the body shattered.

Now ordinarily, being prone to fits of anger management, I would have taken the rest of the ruined instrument and beaten it into shards and slivers while hollering obscenities and slapping myself in the face repeatedly. All that work, so much time, came to nothing. Not only hadn’t I learned from previous mistakes, this fifth iteration was now the ultimate testimony that perhaps I was not cut out to be a guitar luthier. Maybe not even a woodbutcher. Just a complete and irredeemable failure. Sure, I cried, I wailed, I went through depression, I swore on Clapton’s guitar I would never attempt another one.

But dammit, I’m an artist and if there’s one thing I’ve learned being an artist, it’s … well, I’m not really sure I’ve learned anything. Except maybe you have to keep going. Every painting can’t be a Picasso, every glasswork can’t go into the cathedral of Notre Dame, you just have to have faith in yourself even if no one else does, even if the last work was ruined. So I got this idea looking through my box of scrap woods and found a few pieces of matching black limba. Enough to cut away the entire front of that broken box and use it to span the breakage. Instead of a nicely rounded top where the neck attaches, mine was flat. A flat top. What most people think of as the flat soundboard versus an archtop, mine was flat both places, a true Flat Top, possibly the prototype for an evolutionary shift in guitar luthiery. Once again great leaps forward sometimes have their genesis in mistakes. Okay, not mistakes, ‘gestures.’ Feel free to try this at home. Whaddaya got to lose, right?

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My last attempt at South End luthiery was a black limba parlor guitar. I had to tear it apart once, maybe even twice, I can’t remember now after a couple of years of Covid isolation, to fix a problem that made the neck pull down and the action go up. For all you non-luthiers out there, count yourselves lucky. For me, it was the last straw in a year of guitar building misadventures. Most of the five I made got disassembled, repaired, rebuilt and finally just hung on the wall, testament to my obstinacy and incompetence. Some of us are slow learners. And one of us never learns.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right? How about plenty ventured, nothing gained? You can learn a lot about yourself attempting to accomplish what might actually be impossible. The fiddler in our band went to violin making school for three years. Our new mandolin player makes his own and I don’t think he went to school to learn how to do it, but his mandolins are beautiful and the workmanship is superb. I don’t know him well yet, but I suspect he’s meticulous as a clock maker. Me, not so much.

By the time I tried my hand at bending wood for an acoustic guitar I’d built a few banjos. Banjos, well, banjos are a little easier and at the end of the day, a banjo pretty much sounds like a banjo. Oh, sure, you can hear some nuanced differences, but mostly they’re a drum with strings, a percussive instrument that defies respectability. A guitar, on the other hand, has a range of intonations that vary from sweet mellowness to brittle sharpness, mostly the result of the choice of woods, rosewood being the balanced mellow, maple contrasting with a hard tone. Course, being a neophyte, I tried everything from koa to bubinga, maple to walnut, and the last one, a black limba. About the only woods I didn’t use were balsa and plywood.

I won’t even get into the playability factor, the balanced tones from bass to treble, the bracing strategies for guitars like mine with untraditional soundholes, sometimes on the sides, usually two on top, each essentially a new experiment, each always a new challenge. After all, I wasn’t trying to make a duplicate the way my fiddler does his violins, each meticulously fashioned to be a copy of a Stradivarius. Experiments don’t sell well to symphonies. I wasn’t planning to sell to the Philharmonic players.

The truth is, there’s something to be said for repetition, especially if you fine tune the procedures, learn from the previous mistakes and try not to repeat them. But something in me resists that. I wanted each one to be entirely unique, more an artistic statement than a musical one, but in the end, maybe neither. Today I’ve got the spruce top off after an hour of red hot spatula prying without breaking it, but what I’m going to do to fix my problem, god only knows. I liked the guitar before it warped, liked how it looked, liked how it sounded. I waited a year to convince myself to repair it, swore I was done with this folly, promised myself to stick with the banjos. Stay tuned. The guitar probably won’t.

Editor’s Note: Mr. Daddle, after repeated attempts to put lipstick on his ‘pig of a guitar’, has enrolled in a 12 step luthier withdrawal program. Future blog posts, so he claims, will delete all future references to guitar building and consequent deconstructions. He has extended apologies to all, if there are any, readers.

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